Robert Mitchell

Bio

Robert Mitchell is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Affiliated Faculty in Women's Studies, and a Faculty member of the Institute of Genome Sciences and Policy at Duke University. He research focuses on late eighteenth and early nineteenth century intersections between science and literature, as well as more contemporary relationships among biological materials, economics, and information technologies. His published work includes Sympathy and the State in the Romanic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (Routledge, 2007); Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2006), co-authored with Catherine Waldby; and Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (Routledge, 2003) and Semiotic Flesh: Information and the Human Body (University of Washington Press, 2002), both co-edited with Phillip Thurtle. He is also editor, with Phillip Thurtle, of the book series In Vivo: Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science, published by the University of Washington Press.

Abstract

Ends and Means: Digital Labor in the Context of Health

My recent research has focused on ways in which digital medical resources (both web-based databases and electronic patient records) are being used to facilitate what Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby have called “clinical labor”: that is, patient practices that contribute to the health of the patient but at the same time also create either research or economic value for academic researchers or for-profit medical groups. (The dynamic is similar in principle to what occurs when one’s purchasing decisions at sites such as Amazon become part of databases designed to increase the value and profitability of the company). Though this example is less oriented toward the entertainment and/or participatory democracy uses that one often associates with digital labor, it also highlights the conceptual difficulties that we encounter when labor seems to become an end in itself. In the examples that I outline in my presentation, “health” is invariably presented as an unambiguous end: that is, health is not a means for something else, but rather the end for which most other things are means. As a consequence, the clinical labor that an increasing number of people are asked to perform may seem like part of a virtuous circle: though my labor provides economic value for others (and in this sense I am a means), it also creates health for me (and in this sense is itself an end: through such laboring, I am practicing health). However, what I want to underline in this presentation is that this circle can appear virtuous only if we accept a very specific understanding of what “health” can mean.